The highly entertaining memoirs of the man whose job it was to read the President's mail during the half century from McKinley to Truman ... the revealing, often humorous story of the little-known White House official who was paid for being nosey.

Ira R.T. Smith held a job that was unique in the world. For half a century, he opened and read the mail that came into the White House, addressed to all the Presidents from McKinley to Harry Truman. Not all the Presidents liked the idea; but somehow Smith lasted longer than any of them, and he has stories to tell about each—some affectionate, some irreverent, some delightfully humorous.

There was McKinley, last of the old-sytle, frock-coat Presidents, whose greatest sorrow was the endless pile of Army commissions he had to sign with ink that never seemed to dry ... There was Teddy Roosevelt, the Great Outdoor Man, but an utter flop on the White House tennis court ... There was Taft who refused to stay on a diet, and complained once to his train conductor, "What's the use of being President if you can't have dinner on a train?"

It was Ira Smith who opened Mrs. Peck's constant letters to Wilson, and knew the truth that would have confounded all of Washington's gossip mongers. It was Smith—a little afraid for his skin—who opened the letters that Nan Britton sent to Harding, which threatened to expose the President of the United States as the father of her child. It was Smith who played cupid for young John Coolidge, against the orders of the fussy, not always "Silent" Cal.

Ira Smith knew—although Hoover probably didn't—that bootleggers were leaving liquor for the press with the cop at the White House door. And Smith knew the secret of the hidden secretary who recorded every word that was said in FDR's office. And it was Ira Smith that Eleanor Roosevelt—annoyed at his routine search for bombs in every unidentified package that came for her husband—kept insisting, "But everybody loves Franklin!"

Ira Smith's White House career began with a telegram that interrupted him in the middle of a poker game at home in Ohio. It ended 51 years later with a personal letter of appreciation from Harry Truman. The years between were spent at the strangest job in America, handling the amazing letters and gifts that Americans send their President ... letters about wives who have strayed and crops that have failed; fountain pens filled with nitroglycerine; bedspreads and live hogs; 10-gallon bottles of beer and threats of assassination. His revealing story is not only about the Presidents he knew and served, but about the American people themselves ... the outspoken, unknown, but mighty men and women who are the American public, and who write to criticize, praise, cuss out, or just to pass the time of day chatting with their distinguished servant in the White House.

Ira Smith has written his story in collaboration with Joe Alex Morris, who has contributed many articles to the Saturday Evening Post. 

From the dust jacket

You might as well know that whenever you or many thousands of your fellow Americans sat down and wrote a friendly or an indignant or a worried letter to your President, it came to me instead of him. I or my assistants opened it, read it, and directed it toward, either a suitable answer, or the dark recesses of a filing cabinet. And from the days of President McKinley to the fourth year of President Truman's administration, I opened a lot of letters you wouldn't believe unless you saw them.

In a place like the White House nobody ever knows when a truckload of mail dumped on the doorstep will contain highly explosive matter—either a political bomb that must be handled with special care, or an actual bomb that must be turned over to the Secret Service. One or the other can cause a lot of trouble.

I had to make the decisions about which were the important letters and that is one reason why I always felt that the President of the United States and I were leading double lives. We had to, if we were going to last very long in our White House jobs. During working hours, I put myself in the President's shoes and saw that every letter received was sent to the right place for an answer. I made some mistakes I suppose, but so did most of our Presidents, and I outlasted eight of them at the game.

From the dust jacket